Borders--territorial, economic, political, and ideological--are processes of social division. They monitor and exclude and are regulated, patrolled, and maintained by an array of power regimes, but borderlands are also sites of movement, agency, and resistance. Likewise, mathematics is used as a border that divides and politicizes. In this…

In just a decade, the international university rankings have become dominant measures of institutional performance for policy-makers worldwide. Bolstered by the façade of scientific neutrality, these classification systems have reinforced the hegemonic model of higher education--that of the elite, Anglo-Saxon research university--on a global…

The scholastic fallacy consists above all in injecting "meta-" into discourses and practices. In addition to confusing research with politics, a specific way in which the scholastic fallacy can impair one's research is a tendency to divorce the mind from the body, with the latter seen as inferior. One competitor with ideology criticism, close…

Although Namibia has been independent for more than two decades (1990--2014), the school curriculum remains essentially Eurocentric despite rhetoric on educational reform. Similar to other African countries, Western ideological power continues to dominate postcolonial education, even though political power rests in the hands of African leaders.…

This dissertation aims to understand the apparent failure of speech in post-Mao literature to fulfill its conventional functions of representation and communication. In order to understand this pattern, I begin by looking back on the utility of speech for nation-building in modern China. In addition to literary analysis of key authors and works,…

This paper presents a critical analysis of the transnational interplay of cultural, educational and economic forces that culminated with the establishment of a Chinese language and cultural centre in Peru, the Confucius Institute. Confucius Institutes are government-sponsored cultural centres devoted mainly to Chinese language education around the…

Osundare's writing is generally acknowledged as coterminous with the contentious issues of language, style and meaning in Anglophone modern African literature, and because he is seen as representing a generation of African writers, this study highlights and analyzes aspects of Osundare's creative processes of meaning for his thematic project.…

Considerable problems have arisen in New Zealand universities as a consequence of the conflict between the statutory role of the university as the "critic and conscience of society" and the dominant intellectual orthodoxy of cultural essentialism. A number of examples are used to show the extent to which culturalist ideological…

In multilingual Europe, visual discourse may function as a cross-culturally strategic form of communication, thanks in part to its perceptual and iconic availability. In this regard, we offer a social semiotic critique of a range of visual resources deployed in the official promotional texts of 30 of the 43 cities either nominated or competing for…

Perhaps one of the most taken-for-granted features of contemporary social theory is the ritual and increasingly generic critique of Marxism in terms of its alleged failure to address forms of oppression other than that of "class." Marxism is considered to be theoretically bankrupt and intellectually passe, and class analysis is often savagely…